The component known as a passive power divider and/or combiner is one which is widely used in microwave circuits, such as, for example, mixers, power amplifiers, frequency multipliers, etc. When used as a power divider, the component splits an input signal into two or more output signals, and when used as a combiner, combines two or more input signals into one. If it is desired to specify the number of signals which can be combined and/or divide by the component, it can be referred to as an N-way power divider/combiner, i.e. N input signals can be combined into one output signal, and/or one input signal can be split into N output signals.
An obvious desire with components, particularly those used in microwave circuitry, is to make those components as small as possible, so that they can be implemented in, for example, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, MMIC, or in radio frequency integrated circuits, RFIC. In an N-way power divider/combiner, the difficulty to make the component small grows with the factor N.